This movie wounds my heart with its monotonous langour.

Rating: 2/10 (5 October 2008)

Never have so many given so little for so much money. At one point Hans Blech says, "A whole night wasted again!" Well, yes, Hans, but only if you watch the whole thing.
Lots of guys who've done excellent work in films far, far from this one mark their time here imprisoned by an atmosphere of tremendous density, moving through cement in unhurried interiors that suck the life from even Rod Steiger - now that's a rare day - and in exteriors that seem designed to minimize whatever benefit may have been offered by fresh air. There's more lead in this movie's feet than in its guns. You think that's labored prose? Try listening to Richard Burton's Officer's Club scene.
At minute 6 this film is an unwatchably boring series of sea- and landscapes, photographed as if by remote control. By the time somebody speaks, it's in poorly translated French, then intermittently translated German. The first English we hear is bad wisecracks from a b-movie graveyard. Then Liz Taylor's best girlfriend Roddy McDowell recites a tender memory of camping with his Dad. Now you know you're in trouble, but wait: next a bunch of grumpy stars deliver bald exposition like men just awakened from dreams of not being in this movie. At minute 53 somebody finally shoots a German, but I'm already counting sheep named Tom Tryon, Fabian, Paul Anka... all-star has never meant so little. 120 minutes to go. Watching this movie may be the only experience painful enough to compare with actual combat.
American draft-dodger and armchair warhawk John Wayne is a dependably uninspired performer at the best of times, only coming to life when he plays an overbearing prick with a gun in his hand. This movie nefariously circumvents his only cinematic value by sticking him with the kind of up-to-speed dialogue normally delegated to Jeffrey Hunter ("...there's 3 million men in camps just like this one scattered all over this island..."), then breaking his leg so he can't move. Kind of like his real-life inertia while his fellow American Fascist Jimmy Stewart and co-star American Liberal Henry Fonda went off to win DFCs and Bronze Stars fighting three-dimensional Germans and Japanese.
There's one decent battle sequence, including an impressively executed 90-second aerial shot, when the French attack Ouistreham with the help of some nuns, but it's too little too late. Too bad. Overall it's the German interior scenes that come off best, with Blech, Wolfgang Preiss, and the unstoppable Curt Jurgens maintaining some sort of pace under the Prussian lash of Bernhard Wicki. This while Andrew Marton allows Robert Mitchum to stagger up Omaha Beach in a distracted daze, trying to remember where he stashed that third reefer. The scene reminds me of the Paul Verlaine line that signals the start of the whole operation. "Monotonous langour" should be this movie's epitaph.